Peace, Music and the All-Too-Familiar Mud

The 800-acre Winston Farm in Saugerties, N.Y., has long been known as the place that was supposed to host the Woodstock festival.

On Sunday, it got a taste of what could have been when a widely anticipated three-day music and arts festival, the Hudson Project, ended in mud and tears after a tumultuous downpour cut short the concert on Sunday afternoon and stranded hundreds of people in their cars, parked in two grassy fields, some for many hours.

Envisioned as an annual event, the project drew an average of 20,000 people a day to this bucolic corner of upstate New York. Headliners included the rapper Kendrick Lamar and the rock bands Modest Mouse and the Flaming Lips. General admission tickets went from $95 for one day to $225 for a three-day pass.

On its final day, thunderstorms forced festival organizers to evacuate the concert area around 4:45 p.m., and at 8 p.m. the remaining lineup was canceled. (The event was scheduled to end at 1 a.m. on Monday). Some chose to wait out the storms in their cars, but were then unable to drive away after the waterlogged fields turned swampy.

As frustrated concertgoers and their families vented on Twitter and websites, festival organizers and local authorities scrambled to rescue them. On Monday evening, Greg Helsmoortel, supervisor of the Town of Saugerties, said that festival organizers had hired local farmers and contractors with four-wheel drive and all-terrain vehicles to pull cars out of the mud.

“It is 9:20 a.m. Monday morning and my daughter is one of many who are still stuck in the mud at the Hudson Project,” one parent wrote. “Have the organizers abandoned their attendees? Way to kill a fun time.”

Kevin Earle, marketing director for MCP Presents, a festival organizer, said that box lunches and bottled water were provided to concertgoers and that toilet facilities remained open. In addition, he said, people who had arrived on shuttle buses from other cities, including New York and Albany, were transported to a temporary shelter set up by the American Red Cross a few miles away. “Our mission was to get our patrons to safety as quickly as possible,” he said.

Mr. Earle said that festival organizers had worked with local and state officials for months to develop an emergency plan, which included an evacuation based on severe weather. “There were some conditions that were out of our control based on the severity of the weather, but we’re happy to report that everybody was able to exit the festival site safely,” he said.

Mr. Earle added that plans for future concerts would be discussed in coming weeks.

The farm had been used in 1994 for a concert commemorating the 25th anniversary of Woodstock. That time, Mr. Helsmoortel recalled, it had rained, too, but “there wasn’t anywhere near the parking on site as there is now.”

“It was well-received,” he said of the Hudson Project. “The rain really hurt it, but I think they handled it very well after the fact.”

Marcee Rondan, a spokeswoman for the festival, said that the organizer was evaluating the possibility of offering ticket refunds for Sunday. “Our main concern today was getting everyone safely off-site,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Peace, Music and the All-Too-Familiar Mud. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe